Russell Banks - Affliction

He backed toward the door, gazing up at her, concentrating so narrowly on her pale form that he did not see the man emerge from a room at the far end of the balcony — Mel Gordon, dark-eyed, unshaven, short black hair pressed to his narrow skull. He was wearing a wool plaid robe, forest green and blue, the Gordon tartan. He crossed his arms over his chest and studied Wade for a second, and as Wade reached behind him for the doorknob, Gordon said, “Whitehouse. Next time, phone ahead.”

“How’s that?”

“I said, ’Next time, phone ahead.’ ”

The older of the two boys cut a look at his father and said, “Daddy, be quiet, will you?”

Wade smiled and looked down at his feet and shook his head slightly. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. Then he said, “Mr. Gordon, when I come all the way out to serve somebody a summons, I don’t call ahead for an appointment.”

Gordon’s face knotted, and he moved quickly past his wife to the stairs. He said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He hurried down the stairs, as if to close a window against a storm, and when he reached the landing at the bottom, a few feet from where Wade stood by the door, he said, "C’mon, Whitehouse, let’s see it, this summons.” He held out his hand and glared at Wade. “Let’s see it.”

“I got to write it out.” Wade reached into his back pocket and drew out his fat pad of tickets and plucked a Bic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket.

“What the hell are you talking about, Whitehouse?”

“I’m issuing you a ticket, Mr. Gordon. Moving violation.” He pursed his lips and started to write.

“Moving violation! I just got out of bed, for Christ’s sake, and you’re telling me you’re giving me a goddamn speeding ticket?” He barked a laugh. “Are you nuts? Is that it, White-house? You’re nuts? I think you’re nuts.”

Wade went on writing. “Yesterday morning, you passed a stopped school bus, which was flashing its lights, and then you passed a traffic officer holding traffic for pedestrians at a crosswalk,” Wade said without looking up. “Looked to me like you was speeding too. That’s a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. But I’ll let that one go by this time.”

Above them, the pale woman in the dark-green velour robe turned and retreated to one of the bedrooms. Wade glanced up and saw her disappear. The two men would duel down here below, and when only one of them remained, he would mount the stairs to her tower, where he would enter her darkened room. She would not know which of the two men in her life was crossing the room toward her.

Mel Gordon reached out and grabbed Wade’s writing hand, startling him. “Hold on!” Gordon said.

Wade wrenched his hand free. “Don’t ever put your hands on me, Mr. Gordon,” he said.

“You’re talking about a goddamned traffic ticket, aren’t you? From yesterday.”

“Yup.”

“From when I passed you at the school, where you had decided to hold up traffic for a goddamn half hour while you dreamed of becoming a traffic cop or something.” Gordon had stepped back now and was smiling broadly with amused disbelief. A surly pelt of black chest hairs filled in the V of chest exposed by his robe, and the pelt grew almost to his throat. He is the kind of man who has shaved twice a day since early adolescence and thinks all men do. “You going to advise me of my rights, Officer Whitehouse?”

“Don’t give me a hard time, Mr. Gordon. Just take the damn ticket and pay the fine by mail, or go to local court next month and fight it, I don’t care. I’m just—”

“Doing your fucking job. I know. I watch television too.”

“Yes. Doing my job. Here’s your ticket,” he said, and he tore it off the pad and handed the sheet to Gordon.

“You are something. You are really something.”

“Yeah. Well, so are you, Mr. Gordon. Something.” He smiled. “And your kids? They’re rude to strangers,” he added, tossing the boys a hard look, as if they were bugs.

“Hey!” Gordon said. “You might insult my wife, too, while you’re at it.” He took a step toward Wade. “Why the hell not? After all, you probably know all about her father’s accident. Must be something about that you can make a crack on, if you really give it some thought. Why not, Whitehouse? Why not touch all the bases while you’re here?” He smiled meanly.

“Yeah, well, I know about her father. I’m sorry about that.”

Gordon held the ticket out in front of him with one hand and folded it neatly in half and tucked it into Wade’s shirt pocket. He was no longer smiling. “You get the hell out of my house now, asshole. And know this — you are going to be a lucky asshole if I haven’t got you fired before the day is out.” He yanked open the door, turned Wade toward it and said, “I can put your country ass out of work with one phone call, Whitehouse, and I’m just pissed enough to do it now.” He placed a hand against Wade’s stiffened shoulder and moved the man through the doorway to the porch, then slammed the door shut behind him.

For a few seconds, Wade stood out there on the open porch, facing across the white ice-covered lake toward the black line of trees and hills beyond. He patted his shirt pocket, where the folded ticket seemed to give off heat, and then zipped his jacket against the steady breeze that blew across the lake. His mind was filled with the image of the blond woman on the balcony above him, her beautifully fatigued face, her tall slender form as she gazed down and with her eyes asked him to come up the stairs and save her.

WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT IT — which, while driving back to town from Lake Agaway, he did — Wade realized that there was no one in town he could go to for advice concerning the hiring of an attorney. He would never again use the last lawyer he had hired, the guy who got him stuck like this in the first place. That had been a shot in the dark, a lawyer from the Littleton yellow pages, and he had obviously missed. Now, however, Wade knew what he was doing, yes-by-God, and he needed an attorney who would reflect that knowledge.

There were a few people in Lawford who could recommend someone to him — Alma Pittman, Chub Merritt, Gordon LaRiviere — but Wade did not particularly want anyone in town to know what he was up to. Except for Rolfe, who was too long too far out of town and state and could not help him find a lawyer but might advise him generally; and there was Margie, of course, who was different from everyone else in town, because she alone happened to love him — or if she did not love him exactly, she could be brought to love him, he believed, by kindnesses returned, something he had up to now been reluctant to provide.

It was an out-of-balance affair, in which one party, Margie, was a finer human being than the other. But both parties knew it and accepted it, so that the worst thing that could happen, Wade believed, was that Margie someday would find a man who returned her kindnesses and she would leave Wade for such a man. But Wade expected that he would not feel much worse about things then than he did now. Which was possibly why he refused to move in closer to Margie, why he kept his gaze slightly averted at all times, even while making love to her. It did not keep her a stranger, exactly, but it kept her from becoming a wife.

Back in town now, Wade drove past LaRiviere’s, and as he passed he remembered drilling a well once for a man who was a Concord attorney, a guy named J. Battle Hand, whom neither Wade nor LaRiviere himself had ever actually met, but from what he could see, the man was successful: he had bought a large chunk of very expensive land down near Catamount and had built a Swiss-style chalet on the southern slope of a huge hill where there was a ski resort going up on the backside of the hill — condos, restaurants, shops, bars, saunas, a Ramada Inn, a half-dozen different ski slopes and tows: the works. And this guy, J. Battle Hand, owned the undeveloped half of the hill and evidently had no plans to do anything with it but plunk his own vacation home down in the middle of it, setting it in a stand of thick white birches with a lovely long view of the hills of central New Hampshire, only a mile and a quarter from where people drove whole days from Massachusetts and points south to get to.